3 Common Postal Service Challenges

As the United States Postal Service grapples with its financial woes, private courier companies take center stage offering often superior shipping, tracking, and pricing services. While the speed and reliability of mail delivery has undoubtedly improved over the years, people still encounter issues and even obstacles to postal service delivery. Reliable, timely, and cost-effective shipping can be especially challenging for international clients. Here is a look at some enduring problems that customers face with postal services.

Packages become postal service casualties

Unsuccessful package delivery may not necessarily be at the fault of a postal service and can be due to some sort of environmental factor such as the weather, an unrestrained dog spooking the deliveryman, or an enterprising passerby who likes the look of a package sitting pretty and unattended to. Standard practice for items that don’t require a signature is to leave the package at a doorstop and it’s often not practical or even possible to be home during the widely varying delivery times of any one particular service. Depending on the circumstances, this can increase the risk of a package not being delivered or even being completely lost to the recipient. To mitigate these types of risks, it is useful to carefully track a package (when available) or even to send it to an address that is sure to be secured.

Many vendors have shipping restrictions

Not many continental U.S. clients face the problem of not being able to receive or send mail and packages to a particular address. However, if an international customer wishes to buy from an American website or if a tourist in the United States finds something they wish to ship back to their home country, they may encounter barriers to this along with unpleasantly high prices. Many vendors will state that they do not ship internationally or even to some U.S. states such as Alaska or Hawaii. Package forwarding companies such as ParcelBound.com have risen to this challenge by offering consumers a secure U.S. address that mail and packages can be sent to. These companies may also offer help with making international payments to a U.S. site in addition to lowered shipping rates, increased delivery speed, and easily tracked packages for reliability and peace of mind.

Not everyone wants a time capsule

While the stories about receiving a postcard 50 years after it was sent can be charming and cute, it’s not usually the most ideal situation. Not very much is infallible, so letters get lost in transit, mail gets delivered to the wrong address or caught in a never-ending forwarding cycle, packages may accidentally get shuffled into a black hole. While mail may eventually arrive at the correct address, timely delivery is often an issue.

People count on postal services to safely deliver a vast amount of correspondence and packages. The sheer volume of mail makes delivery an incredibly complicated system prone to malfunctions. Luckily, the development of tracking numbers and rapidly increasing services designed to safeguard against package misfortune are addressing these problems and diligently working to remove them.